March 7, 2025. Montclair, NJ. The Free Ebook Foundation and Project Gutenberg are pleased to announce the renovation of the Project Gutenberg MARC record service. MARC, the lingua franca of library catalogs, is used around the world to organize, manage, present and distribute collections via on-line catalogs. From Moby-Dick to Winnie-the-Pooh, from Jane Eyre to Huck Finn, from Albert Einstein to Zora Neale Hurston, they're all in Project Gutenberg, from A to Z.
The Gutenberg MARC files, available in both "mrc" and "xml" formats cover almost 75,000 textual titles. Libraries can import these records, modify them, filter them, redistribute them and display them to patrons looking for free, digital versions of classic books, almost all of them in the public domain, all of them free to read and use.
Project Gutenberg manages its growing collection using a catalog and custom-designed database that have been built up over many years by volunteers. It had been over 10 years since the database had been exported to MARC format, a process that requires a blend of a cataloging experience and software skills. Ray Schwartz, Associate Professor Emeritus at William Paterson University, and Eric Hellman, President of the Free Ebook Foundation, put their heads together to recreate that blend of capability. With advice and support from Project Gutenberg, the new service was born.
The MARC record extract is now being regenerated weekly from the Project Gutenberg Postgres database. This process uses a python script which recreates each MARC record from the entire collection of titles, excluding non-textual titles such as maps, audio files, data sets and so on. The files are available here. For cataloger oriented details on the choices made in producing the records see https://github.com/gutenbergtools/ebookconverter/blob/v10/MARC.md. Project Gutenberg welcomes corrections and errata for its data. (https://gutenberg.org/help/errata.html). For questions and suggestions specific to MARC records, or to make corrections or suggestions for the generating code, the use the issues section of the repo used for this work.
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